I’m sitting in bed, fighting off sleep to finish celebrating and mingling at my birthday party with Kim in the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood game. I can’t quite get there. I need more energy to reach 5 stars, and I need more Twitter followers to become an A-list celebrity (for research purposes only, of course). The offer to pay is there, and I know it will get me to that level of fame I desire in the game, but I’m resistant. I reluctantly give in and spend $5 to finish the party with 5 stars. Why did I initially feel guilty for spending money in the game? I didn’t have to pay to download the game, and I’m having a lot of fun playing it.

Free-to-play games dominate the U.S. Google Play and App Store top-grossing charts. Upward of 85 percent of all revenue from these stores are from free-to-play games. These numbers are high, and they’re getting bigger each day. But we’re not even close to the potential revenue these apps can achieve in the West, so much so that I contend that within 10 years, the West will surpass Japan and Korea in game monetization.

Now those of you close to the numbers in Asia are likely going to call me crazy.

The average revenue per download (ARPD) is an important barometer for developers to analyze the performance and monetization of their apps. According to a February report from mobile analytics firm Distimo, one download on average is worth $5.32 in Japan while in the United States, the ARPD is $2.25. So how can Western games even reach Japanese level ARPD numbers let alone surpass them?

The answer lies with Generation Z. Most children born within the last 10 years won’t know what it’s like to draw on a chalkboard or play with a deck of cards. Instead most kids will be raised on smartphones and tablets. With the iPhone recently celebrating its 6th birthday, children ages 10 and under have now been surrounded by iPhones and apps for more than half of their lifetimes. My 18-month-old twins choose my turned-off iPhone over their favorite stuffed animals every day of the week.

The West has a stigma about paying within free-to-play games that doesn’t exist in Japan and Korea. I never start playing a game on my phone and think “I can’t wait to get to the monetization” or “I will pay to see what’s next”. In countries like Japan and Korea, spending a little money in the game is a normal cultural practice. I’m not there yet, but my kids will be.

So much of everyday life in Asia revolves around the mobile phone, using it to buy a cup of coffee, paying for entrance onto the train, or ordering food. The mobile phone is a single device that acts as a wallet, communication tool, and more; it serves as a lifeline for consumers. In the U.S., we spend more time in cars and pull out plastic to pay for everything.

The American mindset is shifting. It started changing thanks to Zynga’s Farmville. It taught consumers that it’s OK to spend money within a game. Sure, many free-to-play games were available before Farmville, but it was the first to become part of mainstream pop culture. After Farmville was released, it became more common for people to talk publicly about playing that game. A majority of my friends — and especially women — would even tell me how they spent money in the game. Farmville’s entrance into the marketplace was the moment that cultural attitudes toward gaming changed. Paying in free-to-play games was catching on, but no one was admitting how much they were paying. The design of these games were getting people to pay, but not quite to delight them in the moment. It was early days, and the game systems weren’t quite there. But the shift was undeniable. It might take a while to turn the ship completely, but once it gets turning, the perception of games being mainstream will start to favor an Eastern mentality.

The current generation of mobile game players will pay under the right circumstances. Some of them are getting used to the idea of pulling the trigger to pay, but a majority of these consumers still won’t admit publicly if they’ve paid money in a free-to-play game. Why is this? I’ve never met anyone who bragged to me about how much money they spent in Candy Crush Saga. I have however met people who have told me how much money they spent in Clash of Clans. It’s a different type of game and a different type of player, which for some reason makes it more acceptable among the Clash of Clans fan base to pay for free-to-play games.

My kids will not make that distinction. When my kids are old enough to make their own purchases, they won’t think there is a difference between which game genres are “acceptable” to pay for; they won’t think twice about making a decision to spend in a free-to-play game because it will be second-nature for them. They will have grown up with it.

Americans’ behavior with how they interact with mobile games is evolving. Shifting consumer behavior used to take years or decades. The change from one TV per household to three took many years to happen, but the shift from buying CDs to downloading music took just a couple of years. The evolution from flying as a luxury to a commodity took decades, but the idea of paying $3 for a cup of coffee took one visit to Starbucks, and now paying $5 for a cup of Blue Bottle Coffee is my preferred method for ingesting caffeine.

Altering consumer behavior toward technology and interactive entertainment takes less time if it’s all you’ve ever known and it’s quite literally built into your everyday life. If you’ve never lived in a world where you had to be home at 8 p.m. to watch Friends, you wouldn’t find anything strange about watching your favorite TV show whenever you wanted. If you don’t know any difference between a life where you can buy everything with your phone it wouldn’t be so odd to spend $5 in bed to complete a level. You might actually brag about it to your friends the next day, especially if you pass them on the leaderboard.

We’ve drawn a line in the sand in the West for industry standards and metrics like a 5 cent ARPDAU trying to hit 10 cents (or more). We’re hitting retention goals based on current industry standards, and what we should be doing is thinking about drawing a new line. This new goal is going to be drawn so far ahead of the previous line that the current sandbox we’re playing in to determine positive key performance indicators will expand in all directions.

The way we’re designing and thinking about game monetization today is not helping to move the industry forward. We need to rethink everything for the next generation of players, and that next generation will carry us into the new frontier of what’s possible in the free-to-play game market. Currently, the East is where developers try and test everything, but it’s going to shift to the West.

That early crest in the big wave is coming. We have games making a lot of money in the West now. The sophistication of monetization in markets like Japan and Asia is not something that will need to be dumbed down for the West, and we can drive a new standard of complexity. The next generation of mobile game players will lead the way. With the population more than twice the size of Japan and Korea combined, America truly has the size and momentum in the space to be a Sleeping Giant.

Above: Barry Dorf, with future gamers in hand

Barry Dorf is the vice president of partnerships and alliances for DeNA. He has worked in the games industry for over 18 years. He’s responsible for fostering relationships with licensing partners and external game developers to enhance DeNA’s mobile games portfolio.

Before DeNA, Dorf cofounded social gaming network GameStrata and worked at Electronic Arts on the Madden NFL franchise.

]]>0The sleeping giant: How the West will one day embrace paying for free-to-playZen Studios bets on free-to-play by adapting CastleStorm console game to mobile (case study)http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/08/zen-studios-bets-on-free-to-play-by-adapting-castlestorm-console-game-to-mobile-case-study/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/08/zen-studios-bets-on-free-to-play-by-adapting-castlestorm-console-game-to-mobile-case-study/#commentsThu, 08 May 2014 14:33:30 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1469300Zen's publishing chief tells all about transitioning to mobile.
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Mel Kirk, the vice president of publishing at Budapest, Hungary-based Zen Studios, told us the tale in hopes of teaching other console and PC game developers about how to transition from making paid console and PC games to making free-to-play mobile titles. As he related the story, it became clear that it was not an easy thing to do. Yet this kind of transition is becoming critical for traditional game companies if they want to be positioned for survival in the new era of digital games.

“We’re getting our feet wet, and we’re going to see how it goes,” Kirk said in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.

The undertaking was a sizable one for Zen, which has just 60 employees, most of whom have been making pinball games that have sold in the tens of millions. CastleStorm took just seven people to make, but it was a critical title because it diversified Zen beyond pinball.

CastleStorm launched on the PC last year as a first-party title for Xbox Live on the Xbox 360. It was a success there, so the studio adapted it to the PlayStation 3 and the Wii U. All told, CastleStorm sold more than 700,000 units. That’s a good number considering that customers had to pay good money for every single copy. Mobile games rarely have 700,000 people who pay.

“We had mobile in mind as an opportunity,” said Kirk. “But it meant adapting it to the touch screen and a different type of economy and business model.”

Above: CastleStorm

Image Credit: Zen Studios

Above: Mel Kirk

Image Credit: Zen Studios

Zen reworked the game over the past year as a free-to-play mobile game. It had to undertake some big changes, like adapting it for a touch-screen interface. Since CastleStorm featured 2D castles with players lobbing giant rocks at each other via giant ballistas, the design lent itself to the touch screen, which has been good for physics games such as the catapult-friendly Angry Birds titles. Using swiping actions, players move their characters onto the battlefield and launch an attack on the enemy castle.

The team designed the game with sensitivity toward players who don’t want to be ripped off. Players resent games where there is a hard pay wall, where they can play for free for a little while but then have to pay to get over a big obstacle. And players hate it even more if other players can pay to win. Zen wants people who don’t buy anything to have just as big a shot at victory as those who buy things. The campaign in the mobile game is exactly the same as it is on the PC.

“There is so much negative attitude toward companies that try to do money grabs,” Kirk said. “You can go through the whole game without spending. We think it is more fun, and you do less grinding, if you spend. We tried to be very fair, and that required us to spend a lot of time thinking about that during development.”

Zen doesn’t require players to buy things that should be accessible for basic gameplay. And there are no tricks like big buttons that players might accidentally hit with their thumbs that would cause them to buy something instantly.

Of course, Kirk said he recognized it was a huge risk if players don’t see the value in buying anything. Plants vs. Zombies 2 got 25 million downloads when Electronic Arts launched it last summer, but lots of players never bothered to pay for anything in the free-to-play game.

Kirk said the company tested the beta version. Players signed up on its website. At first, Zen Studios was hoping for 1,000 players, but it found that it had more than 6,000 signed up. Those players provided some critical feedback, helping the company fix some bugs. In return, Zen is gifting a lot of crystals, or virtual currency, to those players.

Google had an ability to easily recruit beta testers through its Google+ social network. You simply send a user a private link, and they can join the beta test, sort of like a hidden release of the game.

Zen learned that it was showing too many ads. At first, it was clear that players were annoyed because Zen was showing an ad after every battle. So Zen scaled that back to showing an ad after every three battles.

“We scaled that back,” Kirk said. “People were very comfortable with that. If we had launched with an ad after every battle, people would have just quit, and it would have taken us a long time to figure that out.”

Above: CastleStorm

Image Credit: Zen Studios

Zen hunted down some ad networks that wanted to get certain brands in front of players who have the right demographics. Zen only gets paid for those ads if the users take action, like downloading something or accepting some kind of incentivized offer.

Problems arose with video ads for people who had smartphones with slower 3G Internet access. So Zen showed those players static ads instead.

The ads are a good source of revenue to monetize the players who don’t spend anything. But equally gratifying was that players saw value in buying things. Zen exited the beta test with a solid idea of the lifetime value of a customer, or the average amount of money it would get from a player over the life of the playing time. That means that Zen knows how much it should spend acquiring users through paid advertising when the time comes to do that.

“The most useful feedback to us was the economy,” Kirk said. “The best feedback was on how to present the choice to buy things to players without coming off as greedy.”

One of the things Zen created was daily rewards for coming back to the game every day. It made the rewards meaningful to players.

Zen changed the price of virtual items based on the analytics, which it got at first from the mobile analytics firm Flurry. But over time, Zen decided to use one of its own engineers to create a custom analytics system. So Zen has its own dashboard that measures things that are critical in its own game, like where players get stuck. That data is available on a real-time basis, and Zen can push notifications to players if it wants to do so.

“We built it ourselves, and that’s why it took a while,” Kirk said. “We contracted with some data scientists, and we hope to hire them.”

Zen has also met with outside vendors such as Yvolver, which opened the company’s eyes to things like predicting when players might quit a game and what to do about rewarding them.

The company is launching CastleStorm: Free to Siege today on the App Store, Google Play, and Amazon. It is a full experience with four campaigns, four nations, distinct troop classes, and up to 150 battles. There are eight playable hero characters and a bunch of weapons, spells, and bonus rooms.

Kirk said the company will operate the game as a service. It has a six-month roadmap for content updates, and it can prepare more if the game is a big hit on mobile. Zen will work with other developers with similar games on cross-promotion, which allows the company to exchange traffic without spending money on user acquisition. At some point, Kirk expects to spend money on user acquisition. The team plans to run test campaigns to see what sources of users will work.

Zen has worked with the platform owners to get its shot at being featured on different platforms.

“You should never lose sight of keeping them up to date,” Kirk said. “You have to maintain a good relationship with them.”

Now Zen is exploring making its core pinball games free-to-play.

Above: CastleStorm

Image Credit: Zen Studios

]]>0Zen Studios bets on free-to-play by adapting CastleStorm console game to mobile (case study)Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is Magic: The Gathering for noobs — and it’s one of the best free-to-play games around (review)http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/17/hearthstone-heroes-of-warcraft-review/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/17/hearthstone-heroes-of-warcraft-review/#commentsMon, 17 Mar 2014 15:15:24 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1097364This digital collectible card game offers a surprising amount of strategy, and like Blizzard's other games, it's easy to pick up -- but difficult to master.
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The online collectible card battler from Blizzard Entertainment has grabbed me in a manner no game has in some time. I play several matches — and frequently more — a day, trying to scale the rankings (and doing a rather crappy job of it), earn enough gold to enter the challenging and potentially profitable Arena mode, and unlock more cards. My Instapaper queue brims with articles about deck construction, Arena tips, and card values. I’ve even started watching matches on Twitch — and I’ve never watched the gaming-livestreaming service for anything in the past.

And the most telling sign of how much I play — and how good — Hearthstone is: I haven’t touched Civilization V, a game in which I have played 369 hours, since I got into the card game’s beta.

Here’s why Hearthstone hooked me and how I think it may hook you as well.

What you’ll like

Easy to learn …

I hadn’t played a collectible card game in two decades, and I’d never played a digital one before. Yet it didn’t take long for me to feel comfortable.

The tutorials do an excellent job of teaching you the basic mechanics for constructed-deck play, where you build a deck from the cards you have and fight in battles (ranked or casual) to accomplish quests that give you gold and unlock cards.

Your character’s and your opponent’s faces are on each side of the board. Both start with 30 health, and you attack these “faces,” either with abilities, Minions, or spells, until you bring your foe to 0 health or you die. You play your cards on the board and use your mouse to make them attack either Minions (which are characters and monsters that can attach, defend, or use abilities) or cast spells. You can play defense as well with cards that have Taunt, which forces the other player to attack that card before all others (though they may use spells or abilities on other Minions or your character). And its tutorials give you rewards as well that you can use for buying card packs, entering the Arena, or crafting cards.

That sounds easy, but Hearthstone holds an amazing amount of strategy in how you use these cards and how you get around their powers.

… And a bastard to master

To build an effective deck, you need to balance the cost of your cards. This is the “mana curve,” and you want one that’s balanced and looks like an arc (where the low- and high-cost cards are low and the middle stands out like a hill). But this is more of a challenge than it appears. Some cards work so well with classes that you sometimes throw off that curve, favoring more lower-cost cards, as I do with my Warlock and Shaman, two classes that I have found benefit from having lots of smaller Minions (or the opposite, leaning toward higher cost spells and troops). Another popular Warlock deck features a host of sometimes expensive Giants, whose cost could be high or low depending on certain board conditions. And some players focus on using their high-value Legendaries, throwing off mana curves in the hopes of powerful troops that overwhelm opponents’ decks.

Each class also has a power that costs 2 mana per turn that you should also take into account with deck construction. Shamans summon totems that can provide low-value attacking and Taunt Minions, but it also calls in totems that boost health and spell power. The Paladin can call in 1/1 recruits every turn, and Priests can heal. The Warlock can draw an extra card — at a cost of 2 health as well as 2 mana. Well-built decks take advantage of all these hero powers.

Then come the synergies inside decks. Many Minions and spells work well together, and skilled players not only know how to layer these on top of each other but also have strategies to keep others from doing so. Each of the nine classes have these synergies (the easiest to pick up are Mage and Priest, with Warlock and Shaman being on the difficult side). The Paladin has a lot of buffing cards, so even if you don’t draw a good troop, you can summon and then buff a 1 attack, 1 health recruit (1/1 for short, and attack/health will appear like this throughout the rest of this review). Priests have cards that give you bonuses for healing.

This is the best — and the most frustrating — part of Hearthstone. The Arena is a mode in which you build a 30-card deck from random draws (with three choices per set). You then take that deck into battles against random foes. The goal is to get as many wins as you can before you lose three bouts. The number of victories determine your rewards. Even if you go winless, you get a deck of cards and either a common card or a small amount of Dust (a magical element you use to craft cards you don’t have in your deck) or gold. But the more matches you win, the better the rewards — including chances to get Epic and Legendary cards. Win seven, and you get enough gold for another Arena run.

Deck-building strategy, through, is different in the Arena than in standard play. Minions are much more important because you’re not sure what synergies you’ll be able to take advantage of — two of my best runs were playing Hunter decks with just one or two Beasts, the backbone of that class’s deck. So you want to take the most powerful troops that you can — though this doesn’t necessarily mean those with the biggest mana. A 2-mana Bloodfen Raptor has 3 attack and 2 health with no special ability, but it’s frequently a better play than a 3-mana Minion with a special ability but lower health because that Raptor stands a better chance of surviving the round, especially if your foe only has one with 1 attack on the board. (This is called “the Vanilla” test.)

It takes time to grow used to this, and oddly enough, I’ve found that Arena matches have only become more difficult, not less, as the new players filtered in.

You don’t need to ‘pay to win’

I didn’t pay for a single pack or Arena run until I decided I wanted to review Hearthstone, and then I only did just so I could test how these work. I bought 15 packs for $20 and five Arena runs for $2 a pop. I didn’t actually reel in that many rare cards that I hadn’t already earned. I did bag one rather useful Legendary, the Bloodmage Thalnos, who grants all your spells +1 damage and a card for your hand when he dies. He’s not an overpowering card but certainly more useful than many of the other Legendaries.

I actually destroyed a number of cards from those packs for Dust, using it to craft two Argent Commanders (a rare 6-mana card that has both Charge and Divine Shield). But I don’t consider the money I spent, which at $30 is half of a standard game, to be that much of a game-changer. Maybe I had poor luck with my packs? Maybe others pulling 15 packs nab more Rares and Legendaries than I did.

I even tested this with $40 worth of cards — 40 packs, with five in a pack. That’s 200 cards. And what did I get? I got two new Legendaries — Ysera, a powerful dragon, and King Mulka, an 3-mana card with 5/5 — two Giants, and 149 duplicate cards. And of those 47 “new cards,” 11 were Golden versions of commons I already had. A significant portion of the others were from classes I never use (hence, cards I hadn’t either unlocked or created yet). I did get 1,045 Dust from disenchanting the dupes, and that’s not even enough to craft a single Legendary.

While this is a one-test example, it shows that you just simply can’t “pay to win” unless you throw in gobs of money. I doubt Hearthstone would attract the same “whales” (that tiny slice of players who pay big bucks in free-to-play games) that you find in more casual games, where you know that money you spend on items isn’t tied to randomness. You need lots of practice and study to succeed at Hearthstone, not a fat wallet.

Game developers and app sellers are getting a stern talking to from the European Union.

This week, Apple and Google are meeting with the European Commission, the executive body of the EU, to cover the conflicts that free-to-play games present to consumer protection. The app industry employs 1 million people in Europe, and in-app purchases generate more than $13.8 billion in revenue across the continent, according to analytics firm Distimo. To maintain those jobs and the influx of cash, the EU wants to ensure that it can trust that free-to-play games are not employing deceptive tactics to squeeze money from under-informed players. This meeting is focusing on mobile even while the microtransaction model grows on traditional platforms like PC. That’s likely because the big free games on PC (like action-strategy title League of Legends) have a reputation for fairness.

“Europe’s app industry has enormous potential, both to generate jobs and growth, and to improve our daily lives through innovative technology,” EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement. “For the sector to deliver on its potential, consumers must have confidence in new products.”

The commission explained that it was holding these hearings following “complaints from all over Europe.” These deal with games that encourage players, especially kids, to make in-app purchases while presenting the product as totally free.

“Misleading consumers is clearly the wrong business model and also goes against the spirit of EU rules on consumer protection,” said Reding. “The European Commission will expect very concrete answers from the app industry to the concerns raised by citizens and national consumer organisations.”

The EU plans to discuss a number of issues with the industry. It wants games marketed as “free” to in no way mislead gamers about the true costs involved. Apps should not emphatically urge children to buy items. Players should know the exact payment arrangements, and developers should not set up games to accept payments without first getting full consent. Finally, developers should make their email address available to consumers to answer complaints and queries.

“Consumers, and in particular children, need better protection against unexpected costs from in-app purchases,” EU commissioner Neven Mimica said. “National enforcement authorities and the European Commission are discussing with industry how to address this issue which not only causes financial harm to consumers but can also put at stake the credibility of this very promising market. Coming up with concrete solutions as soon as possible will be a win-win for all.”

Valve makes games. It makes a digital-download service. And now it makes documentary films.

The company revealed that its film Free to Play will debut on March 19. It documents the lives of a handful of professional Dota 2 players as they struggle to win big in Valve’s free-to-play action-strategy title. Valve produced the feature-length film as a way to capture the surging popularity of Dota 2 as a premier game in the e-sports scene.

Valve will release Free to Play on its Steam online-retail store at no cost following a special screening at the Castro Theater in San Francisco on March 18. The company release the following trailer as part of this announcement:

While Free to Play is about Dota 2 and Valve’s $1 million tournament for its game, the documentary focuses more on the sacrifices some of the top players have made to get to where they are.

The documentary follows three players: Danil “Dendi” Ishutin of L’viv, Ukraine; Benedict “HYHY” Lim of Singapore; and Clinton “Fear” Loomis of Medford, Ore. In the clips from the trailer, we learn that Loomis’s parents kicked him out of the house for playing too much Dota. 2 We see that Lim’s mother berates him for letting his grades slip. We see Ishutin talk about throwing himself into gaming to escape pain in his personal life.

All three pros are desperate to win, and that’s where a lot of the film’s conflict comes from.

Dota 2 is one of Valve’s big games for the future. It earned approximately $80 million in microtransaction sales last year. That is only a fraction of what League of Legends — Dota 2’s biggest competitor — earned last year. That title generated $624 million in microtransaction revenue.

“I anticipate Dota 2′s success will continue in 2014,” SuperData analyst Joost van Dreunen told GamesBeat in January. “Over the course of 2013, Dota 2 managed to triple monthly revenues. Considering the current momentum behind the category, we expect it to double monthly earnings by the end of 2014.”

With that kind of cash on the line, Valve is obviously keen to invest in Dota 2 with its e-sports tournaments and marketing films like Free to Play. This is Valve’s first film.

]]>0First the living room, now the movie theater: Valve releasing Dota 2 documentaryBlizzard’s Hearthstone card game opens to the publichttp://venturebeat.com/2014/01/21/blizzards-hearthstone-goes-into-open-testing/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/21/blizzards-hearthstone-goes-into-open-testing/#commentsTue, 21 Jan 2014 22:00:09 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=885674The collectible-card game is now open to all North American players.
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Buy some flowers for your significant other right now. You’re gonna need them when you lose all of your time playing Hearthstone.

Blizzard has officially opened up its free-to-play Hearthstone to everyone in North America. The collectible-card game (think a stripped-down take on Magic: The Gathering) that has players facing against one another online is now in an open “beta” phase that anyone can join by downloading the game from PlayHearthstone.com.

“It’s been a crazy past few months for all of us on the Hearthstone team,” reads a Blizzard blog post. “We announced Hearthstone at PAX East back in March, began the closed beta test in August, had a great Hearthstone event at BlizzCon with the Innkeeper’s Invitational along with our announcements for Android and iPhone support, and now we’re ready to unleash the awesomeness of Hearthstone to you with open beta.”

In Hearthstone, you may spend money on additional cards or runs in the Arena, a special mode with better rewards than the standard game. Blizzard also intends to debut an iPad version of the game soon followed by an Android and iPhone release. Since August, the game has been in a prerelease state that was only accessible by invitation from Blizzard.

The open beta means that anyone can start playing the game immediately. Blizzard also doesn’t intend to wipe stats or testers’ personal collections anymore. A few times during the closed beta, Blizzard had to reset all data to test out changes to the system.

While the open testing is only currently available for North American players, the company says it plans to launch it in other regions in the next few days.

]]>0Blizzard’s Hearthstone card game opens to the publicFact: You can make money playing video gameshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/10/30/fact-you-can-make-money-playing-video-games/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/30/fact-you-can-make-money-playing-video-games/#commentsWed, 30 Oct 2013 15:54:02 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=849866Pro gamers don't just make money from tournaments. Even average players can find ways to earn some cash.
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REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — Playing video games full-time is not a viable source of income, some would say. Others believe professional players only make money from winning tournaments. These ideas are “giant misconceptions,” according to Mike Sepso, the co-founder and president of Major League Gaming and the leader in e-sports broadcasting.

“Yeah. I’m extraordinary jealous of some of our pros,” responded Sepso during GamesBeat 2013’s “The Rise of E-sports” panel, when asked whether it’s possible to make a living by playing games.

The shift in long-term sustainable games has enabled professional gamers to create successful careers within e-sports over the past few years. However, this wasn’t always the case. Caleb Fox, the head of e-sports for Wargaming America, recalls large annual shifts of top players on the pro circuit. This was especially evident for “package goods,” as Fox describes — titles such as Call of Duty, which see a new version every year.

“Imagine playing [in the NFL], and they change the rules of football every two years,” Fox said. “Or even every year, in the case of Call of Duty.”

With the rise of free-to-play titles and the philosophy of games as a service, developers are able to support games long-term. This in turn allows players to build a professional career on a game that won’t dramatically change within a couple of years but instead evolve slowly over the course of 10 or 15 years.

Making a living off playing video games doesn’t necessarily require players to win all the time, either. Much of it, as Sepso points out, comes from good marketing.

“Like other sports, the teams who are the top earners in [Major League Gaming] and the U.S. are not the ones that win all the time,” Sepso says. “They’re the ones who market themselves the best, who have the biggest Twitter followings and biggest Youtube channels.”

You don’t even have to be a professional gamer to make money playing games nowadays. With new streaming services such as Twitch, people who wish to earn a living from playing games can now achieve that. Top streamers can earn thousands, depending on their subscription base. They also get paid from ads, which run during downtime. As long a streamer is garnering enough views per ad, they will earn money.

Bottom line, playing games can actually be good for your wallet.

]]>0Fact: You can make money playing video gamesWhy gamers hate free-to-play, and how developers can work around it (interview)http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/26/why-gamers-hate-free-to-play-and-how-developers-can-work-around-it-interview/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/26/why-gamers-hate-free-to-play-and-how-developers-can-work-around-it-interview/#commentsThu, 26 Sep 2013 15:30:55 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=818129We talk to Blue Manchu, creator of the fantastic Card Hunter, to see what's wrong with the free-to-play model and how developers can overcome the stigmas.
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What else does a developer have to do to win gamers over? Perhaps charge people $60 to play? No, seriously.

Independent developer Blue Manchu recently released Card Hunter (PC, Mac) to positive reviews (like ours). But it still has a strange obstacle to overcome for more widespread acceptance: its lack of a price tag. Traditional economic models be damned — gamers just don’t seem to respect free to play (F2P). And in this day and age!

We interviewed Blue Manchu’s Jon Chey — “the guy who pays the bills” if you ask him, and managing director to everyone else — to learn more about this fascinating phenomenon. Why isn’t this business model working out for all game makers? Why are gamers resistant to try out something that’s free? And how can developers win over suspicious customers?

GamesBeat: What do you think exactly is the problem that gamers have with free-to-play? Joe McDonagh, the cofounder of Blue Manchu, even mentioned seeing some “hostility.”

Jon Chey: I think gamers are worried that free-to-play models are sucking the life out of gaming — that all games in the future are going to be replaced by rapacious grind-fests that drag you in and then squeeze every last cent out of you as you try to get through them. That their play experience will be ruined by constant in-your-face pressure to spend money. You know, that sort of thing.

We tend to get a lot of comments on our forums and other places where we interact with our audience expressing those [types of] thoughts.

The good thing, though, is that having been through a lengthy beta where players have been able to test out the game and see how the monetization system works, we now have a pretty large group of players who can speak directly to the issue. Instead of us having to leap and say, “Oh, don’t worry — our game isn’t like that,” we can let other players do the talking for us. That tends to assuage fears a lot better than anything we could do or say.

For example, I saw a tweet this morning from someone saying how much fun they were having and then a reply from one of their followers saying, “Damn, I think you’ve convinced me to try a free-to-play game!”

GamesBeat: What’s the worst feedback you’ve ever read?

Chey: “Looks interesting, but I’m not going to try it.” That’s a real kick in the guts every time I see it, given that the reason we made it free-to-play was to try to get people to play it. Would more people try it if it cost $20 to get in? I guess we’ll never know.

Above: A Card Hunter module.

Image Credit: Jason Wilson/GamesBeat

GamesBeat: Who do you think is guilty of perpetuating the negative stigma, gamers or developers?

Chey: Interesting question. Who do you blame for drug addiction, the addict or the dealer? Developers created the product, but gamers played — and paid.

GamesBeat: How do you convince these people to check out your game? Or is that a lost cause?

Chey: I guess for those players, it’s more important for us to focus on the gameplay side rather than the monetization side: that is, for us to pitch our message around what the game is rather than the free-to-play aspect. More “Hey, come try this new card-game, board-game, RPG mash-up (oh, and by the way, it’s free-to-play)” and less “PLAY NOW, MY LORD! FREE FOREVER!”

But ultimately, it’s going to be very hard for us to convince people who are suspicious of the free-to-play model to try the game. If you suspect that a game is designed to trap you into spending money or wasting your time, you’re unlikely to believe assurances to the contrary from the game maker.

GamesBeat: Do you think the problem is more with free-to-play, with browser gaming, or both equally?

Chey: I think free-to-play is the big bugbear right now. Browser games are a relatively small segment of the market and easy to ignore if you don’t care for them, whereas free-to-play models have been taking over and converting some much loved franchises.

Continue Reading ...]]>0Why gamers hate free-to-play, and how developers can work around it (interview)Thanks for the crowns: How to be a castle champion in Ubisoft’s The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot (preview)http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/10/the-mighty-quest-for-epic-loot-preview/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/10/the-mighty-quest-for-epic-loot-preview/#commentsWed, 10 Jul 2013 22:30:33 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=777513Ubisoft Montreal offers some tips on how to become a castle champion in its need dungeon-crawler meets castle-defender game.
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The main draw of Ubisoft Montreal’s The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is deviously clever: The next dungeon you raid may be a player’s, and while you’re busy hauling off the treasure, someone else could be stealing yours.

Well, they’re castles instead of dungeons, but you get the idea. Players build and defend their very own fortress in the sky and plunder other people’s castles — if they can handle the challenge. It’s a constant tug-of-war to see who can not only design an unbeatable castle but also conquer the most.

The Mighty Quest is a free-to-play action-role-playing game mixed with tower defense — only you don’t actively participate in the guarding of your castle. You set up the traps, position the monster minions, and sit back and see who fails to overcome them and who wrecks your best-laid plans.

This is all going on now in closed beta on PC. (The Mighty Quest is expected to launch officially in the fall.)

“The core idea, the one that got everybody excited, is very simple: to have a game in which each player builds his castle and can attack the castle of others,” The Mighty Quest writer Matthew Zagurak told GamesBeat. “With such an concept, online player-versus-player was a natural fit.”

So, how can you be better than the competition? We got the developer to share some insider tips and strategies.

Above: A castle room filled with frog-like Snotters and their boss.

Image Credit: GamesBeat

The best of two worlds

If you like action-RPGs like Diablo or Torchlight (which is, like this game, a little cartoony), then you’ll automatically warm up to The Mighty Quest. I even noticed a castle filled entirely with chickens and asked Zagurak whether this was an intentional reference to Diablo III.

“I should lie and say yes, but it is actually just a coincidence,” he said.

The Mighty Quest is an impressive melding of both genres, however. Players must devote their efforts to strengthening their home defenses and also make time to defeat other castles. How much energy you dedicate to each task determines how successful you’ll be, but balancing the two isn’t easy.

“Both are actually as important as you may not have sufficient resources to build your defenses if you never loot other people’s castles,” said Zagurak. “It is the same thing the other way: If a player keeps on looting but does not protect his own loot sufficiently, other players will make sure he or she does not keep it for too long.”

That means focusing equally on offensive and defensive strategies, yet gameplay involves more thought than just charging blindly into castles and dumping minions into whatever available space you might have.

“Building your castle through its layout, its rooms, and traps really is all about expressing your personality in the game,” said Zagurak. “You can have very straightforward, large rooms leading directly to the loot pile — but filled with the biggest, deadliest creatures — but also very twisted, almost maze-like ones constructed with narrow corridors and multiple pathways [that leave] less space for traps and creatures. Some people actually like to create very complex castles that can be extremely tough for the player to go through, ending up on a dead end, as the treasure room was in fact located just near the entrance! It’s really fun to watch and discover how creative our players can be.”

Castle construction and battles are similar to Peter Molyneux’s Dungeon Keeper, but with a key difference. You don’t interact with your minions as they fight. Invasions on your territory and on another player’s are separate affairs.

Above: An example of a castle you can design and maintain.

Image Credit: GamesBeat

A real sense of challenge

Depending on what type of hero you pick (you can train more than one), you may find yourself breezing through castles or struggling to stay alive. I viewed this as a refreshing change of pace as many standard action-RPGs quickly shift to autopilot: click, destroy, click, destroy.

“We have some players that still like to specialize their defenses against one type of hero: Knight, Archer, or more recently, Mage,” said Zagurak. “It can then become pretty hard for one of these types of hero to invade the castle, when it could be very easy for the others! Switching between your different heroes may be the final answer when everything else has failed.”

That’s good advice. I found myself falling behind as the Knight, but when I tried out the Mage, I was amazed at how natural the magic user felt to me. Usually I go into dungeon-crawlers with someone who wields a sword because, well, I just like hitting demons and other vile creatures in the face. I tend to avoid magic users because they can be physically weak, but this game offered me a different perspective. I actually liked the Mage — although I noticed very little personality difference between the two classes. (Both seem like jovial partygoers and even sound alike.)

Climbing the ranks

The better you perform in an enemy castle, the better rewards you obtain. That may mean the difference between taking a cut of the treasure at the end or earning stars: one for completing the castle without dying, one for using less than three potions, and one for reaching the final room before the time limit expires. This nets you “crowns” for your efforts.

“You gain crowns when you successfully loot somebody’s castle, and you lose some when somebody loots yours,” said Zagurak. “In the end, it gives players an idea of your level in the game beyond even your hero’s or castle’s level as these are simply increasing steadily as you keep on playing. There is an international leaderboard that ranks people according to their number of crowns, and right now we have a French and an Egyptian player battling for the top!”

If you’re having trouble scoring all three stars, Zagurak recommends experimenting with different tactics. “There are many ways a player can customize his or her hero before attacking a castle,” he said. “Alternating between pieces of gear with different characteristics, changing the special powers selected, and trying different approaches depending on the castle’s layout is a first. Looting other castles to get better gear can be a good idea, too.”

Players can leave messages once they’ve plowed through someone’s castle, which adds some playfulness to the experience. What they write varies, of course. “We have players congratulating others when their castle proved to be a great challenge; others like to give advice on how to enhance their defenses,” said Zagurak. “And, of course, a lot of taunting, which is part of the fun of our game. Nothing’s better than a bit of provocation to have its castle tested and played thoroughly! There is actually a phrase that’s starting to be a recurring gag in-game: ‘Thanks for the crowns.'”

Zagurak said that right now, level caps for heroes and castles are set at 30, “although that will of course evolve in the future.” Castles can contain up to 10 rooms. “As for the crowns, they are not limited by your level or really anything else,” he said. “It only comes down to who the best player is.”

And how willing you are to play on. The Mighty Loot’s concept is almost too clever. What keeps players coming back is a sense of obligation — to mine gold and other goods periodically (or paying currency to finish faster), to improve defenses and monitor whether they’ve lost any treasure, to check their rank, and so on. It’s the same addiction that you might feel with a typical free-to-play game, where you wait so long for an action to complete and return daily to keep everything in tip-top shape.

Only this isn’t your average free-to-play game. It may just be better.

]]>0Thanks for the crowns: How to be a castle champion in Ubisoft’s The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot (preview)Stop congratulating yourselves over E3 — console makers and publishers are massively missing out on mobilehttp://venturebeat.com/2013/06/14/stop-congratulating-yourselves-over-e3-console-makers-and-publishers-are-massively-missing-out-on-mobile/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/14/stop-congratulating-yourselves-over-e3-console-makers-and-publishers-are-massively-missing-out-on-mobile/#commentsFri, 14 Jun 2013 19:30:02 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=758761Guest:This year's E3 will be the last time we see record attendance at the conference and that over the next five years, E3 will struggle to stay relevant in an increasingly global mobile/tablet gaming world.
]]>GUEST:

E3 ended yesterday, and even before the conference came to an official close, the mega booths with Time Square-sized displays and rock concert-quality sound systems are already fading from the industry’s collective memory. PlayStation 4. Xbox One. The first batch of next generation $60-a-shot sequels. Many were whispering that they’d seen this cycle before; that it seemed like 2006 all over again. There is one key difference this time ’round — we’re living in 2013.

I predict this year’s E3 will be the last time we see record attendance at the conference and that over the next five years, E3 will struggle to stay relevant in an increasingly global mobile/tablet gaming world. Just as the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) reduced from two gatherings annually to one and Qualcomm has replaced Microsoft as the keynote, so, too, will E3 decline and hopefully evolve. Why? Free-to-play (F2P) mobile games are eating into the market for console games, and mobile game developers simply don’t require city-sized shows to influence the market or reach consumers.

The massive growth of F2P mobile gaming corresponds with one of the most revolutionary periods in the industry since consoles replaced the coin-operated arcade in the early 1990s. In less than two years, Kabam has gone from having no apps in the iOS and Android stores to being a top 10 global publisher and developer. We are proud of this accomplishment and to be joined by eight “new” F2P mobile publishers/developers. The notable omission of traditional game companies from the top 10 list (only Electronic Arts makes the cut) is shocking given consumer spending on iOS games eclipsed handheld “console” games in Q1 2013 . Where are Activision, Ubisoft, Take-Two, and the other industry leaders? Why are these companies’ investors allowing them to sit this platform out?

The hard reality is that mobile gaming is as different from console gaming as console gaming is from coin-op arcade games. Every month, companies submit 6,000 new games to the iOS and Android app stores. A large majority of these games are free-to-play, which means consumers can choose whether they want to continue playing and eventually pay for the game (usually through in-game purchases) they just downloaded. Also, as supported by the Top Grossing rankings, the most successful genres and associated game designs are those that steer heavily into the mobile and tablet use cases in a way that many console games cannot.

I read a lot of articles about how the “science” of F2P gaming is crowding out the ‘art’ of gaming. A good number of console game developers cling to this belief, oftentimes pointing to the meteoric rise and decline of Zynga as proof. And just like the coin-op game developers before them, this audience misses the point; their personal gaming preferences are no longer representative of the market. The market has moved — and will continue to move — toward free-to-play mobile gaming.

At Kabam, we maintain that F2P mobile game development requires a balance of science and art and that the art is increasingly important given the power of the underlying device. With their dual-core/quad-core processors, powerful GPUs and memory, the iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S4, Nexus 4, and other devices match the power of current generation handheld gaming devices and soon current generation consoles. These are muscle cars waiting to be driven fast and furiously by gamers playing such mobile titles as Warner Bros.’ Injustice. Given the appeal of console-quality graphics, sound, and gameplay, it’s no surprise it’s a top-grossing game on the app store charts.

Looking forward it won’t be long before all publishers and developers come to understand the importance of balancing the art and science of game development. Traditional game developers will need to add science to their mix; F2P mobile game developers will need to add art. Those who make these changes quickly will flourish; those who do not will be selected out via industry Darwinism.

We’ll see who’s leading the F2P mobile revolution in five years. I can’t wait to buy my ticket for E3 Mobile 2018.

LOS ANGELES — Third-party game publishers are typically shy about favoring one game console maker over another.

But Electronic Arts’ Frank Gibeau, the president of EA’s worldwide labels, said at an investor breakfast what may be obvious about the dueling at the Electronic Entertainment Expo press briefings that Sony and Microsoft staged to introduce their PlayStation 4 and Xbox one video game consoles.

“Sony is having a great show. They have done a good job on services, price points” and policies for consumers. “We like the reception to all of the news from console makers. Sony is striking the rirght balance. Microsoft is showing killer capababilities that we have known about for a while. People have stopped talking about whether Generation 4 will be a growth driver.”

Sony drew more applause at its event for pricing its machine at $399, or $100 lower than Microsoft’s Xbox One. Sony also was praised as more consumer friendly in deciding not to charge for used games and putting few restrictions on consumers, in comparison to Microsoft.

Now, he said, they are talking about the growth that will happen this fall. He acknowledged that EA gave Microsoft a big exclusive with the announcement that Respawn Entertainment (founded by Call of Duty pioneer Vince Zampella) will launch its title Titanfall exclusively on the Xbox One. But that is considered a “tactical exclusive,” or a limited endorsement for one console.

While Gibeau praised Sony, this doesn’t mean, however, that EA is going to favor Sony over Microsoft when publishing games exclusively. EA’s strategy is to be a cross-platform company so that it can reach the biggest audience for its games and spread out the costs of its development and marketing.

“Over the lifetime, we are not tilting one way or another on these platforms,” Gibeau said.

Last time around, Gibeau said the consoles were very different.

“Now the architectures are more alike than different,” he said. “We are able to get more efficiencies” about the commonality between the upcoming consoles.

As for the hot consumer rights topic of used games, Gibeau said EA is still evaluating the announcements about used games. He said that EA’s position would be consumer-friendly and a promote a positive experience with consumers.

“We make the ammunition in the hardware wars,” Gibeau said.

One investor asked why EA had not launched a free-to-play version of FIFA Soccer.

Gibeau replied, “I think you’ll be very pleased this fall.”

He said afterward that EA will adapt FIFA for touchscreens and also launch its Korean online version of FIFA in more territories like Russia and Brazil.

]]>0EA exec Frank Gibeau: ‘We make the ammunition in the hardware wars’Warframe ported to PlayStation 4 in just three monthshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/06/11/warframe-ported-to-playstation-4-in-just-three-months/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/11/warframe-ported-to-playstation-4-in-just-three-months/#commentsWed, 12 Jun 2013 00:35:18 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=756056Digital Extremes' sci-fi ninja action game is already playing smoothly and looking beautiful on the PlayStation 4 after just three months of development.
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LOS ANGELES — Digital Extremes’ free-to-play online multiplayer action game, Warframe, was recently announced for the PlayStation 4. On display at this week’s E3, it looks on par with its PC iteration, currently in open beta. Creative Director Steve Sinclair told GamesBeat that the team only received its PS4 dev kits just three months prior to the public unveiling.

Sinclair praised the PS4 for its power and ease of development, and he pointed to the playable Warframe demo as proof of both. As previously reported, Warframe on PC felt like it needed to be played with a controller, and now it will be with the PS4 version. Digital Extremes has added touchscreen functionality for quickly using special abilities as well as having the announcer communicate with the player through the controller’s speakers.

Warframe will launch aside the PS4 later this year, and Digital Extremes says it plans to pump it full of as much variety and content before and after release.

]]>0Warframe ported to PlayStation 4 in just three monthsFighting the robot wars: Mechwarrior Online vs. Hawken vs. Heavy Gear Arenahttp://venturebeat.com/2013/04/30/fighting-the-robot-wars-mechwarrior-online-vs-hawken-vs-heavy-gear-arena/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/30/fighting-the-robot-wars-mechwarrior-online-vs-hawken-vs-heavy-gear-arena/#commentsTue, 30 Apr 2013 22:42:50 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=726943Giant mech games have migrated from retail releases to the free-to-play multiplayer arena. We break down three heavy hitters to help you determine which walking tank is right for you.
]]>Gaming execs:Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on March 6 Pacific!

Let’s be real. Everybody wants to jump into the cockpit of a fully loaded, 40-ton robot and pilot it straight into combat. Everybody. That’s core geekdom, right there. It’s in our DNA.

Lucky for us, you won’t find any shortage of heavy-metal enablers. Two big, free-to-play, online-multiplayer mech games — the elder statesman of robo-warfare and a hotshot challenger — are currently running open betas. A third, based on a nearly-forgotten franchise, is on the way.

Best of all, each one takes a different approach to its carnage. Here’s how the contenders break down.

Mechwarrior Online

If you’re looking for a gold standard in mecha games, up until very recently, the conversation started and stopped with Mechwarrior. “There’s a lot of good weight with that name,” a producer on a competing game readily told me, and he’s not kidding. Its credentials stretch back to 1989 — further if you throw in Battletech, its pen-and-paper RPG forebear — and good luck finding a PC gamer from that time who doesn’t get a pleasant chill just from hearing the battlemech start-up sequence.

It’s different, but yep … Mechwarrior Online has a start-up sequence.

A decade after the last entry in the franchise, Piranha Games brought the classic back with a lot of its nuances intact and an epic scope few others can match. Moreover, Mechwarrior gives you a real sense of piloting a heavy piece of machinery with lots of guns on it. It’s the mech simulation game, equal parts strategy and twitch.

Accordingly, customization plays a major role. Everything about your battlemech revolves around dishing out buckets of pain while managing your heat buildup; overheat, and your unstoppable death machine shuts down, leaving you a sitting duck. You also get to swap out components inside and out, including where your weapons go and in what order they cycle … all the better to follow up high-heat lasers with low-heat ballistic guns and give your mobile suit a second to cool off.

Mechwarrior pays off when you take that custom job into a firefight and see all your decisions pay off. I guarantee nobody wins this game without using their head first.

Bigger mechs give you a bigger platform to build on, but they cut your speed down until a few puny chicken-walkers can literally run circles around you. That gets embarrassing, but it’s a result of pitch-perfect balancing.

In terms of cost, Mechwarrior issues a few free mechs, a few try-before-you-buy “trial mechs” you can take for a limited spin, and then things get expensive, whether you’re spending in-game C-bills or real-world money. A “hero” battlemech can run you anywhere between $17-24, plus a few bucks to open the slot in your mech bay and any cash you want to peel out to pimp your ride. Piranha also offers paid premium time, which boosts your leveling for an hour at a time.

Beyond that, Mechwarrior has another big ace: the franchise’s almost 30 years’ worth of continuity. Piranha leverages it well. When the game leaves beta for live sometime this summer, along with a complete revamp of the user interface and an expansion from 8-vs.-8 matches to 12-vs.-12, it’ll launch an overarching metagame called Community Warfare.

“You can start to play faction-based gameplay,” says Piranha president Russ Bullock. “You can create a mercenary unit and challenge other mercenary units. Or if you want to join one of the great houses of the Inner Sphere, you can work your way up the ranks.” Bullock’s team is also looking into supporting pirate classes who just make trouble.

“In the final phase, you’ll start to battle for territory in the Inner Sphere,” says Bullock. “A lot of the border worlds between the great houses will be up for grabs.” And certain perks go with controlling that territory … perks that vanish if another house takes a planet away.

Here’s the other thing. Mechwarrior Online unfolds in real time, so every minute that passes in April 2013 is a minute passing in April 3049. That plays into a little something Piranha creative director Bryan Ekman calls “the integrity of the timeline.”

“There is a certain set of prescripted events that have to happen,” says Ekman. Meaning roughly six months after Mechwarrior Online goes live, the Inner Sphere experiences one of the more cataclysmic events in the franchise’s history — the Clan Invasion. And then those planets the great houses fought over start falling to the clans, leaving players either fending off the invaders or fighting over what’s left. “It’s so dynamic,” Ekman adds. “So much happens in a very short amount of time. We felt it would be a fantastic way to keep players engaged. They’ll see the changes daily, participate in those changes, and affect how the universe looks.”

Those events will drive Mechwarrior Online for the next two years. Consider that ideal ground for an aspiring pilot in their fully customized walking tank who wants the weight of history behind them.

Or maybe you just want to strap into a giant robot and light some fools up. Let me tell you about Hawken.

We’ve already written about how much wisdom came out of the VentureBeat Mobile Summit boardroom sessions, but let’s talk about something specific: mobile monetization, which is rightfully a subject on the minds of just about every developer.

Making money on mobile is tough — but it doesn’t have to be. According to Darya Trushkina, business development vice president at Game Insight and Narr8, developers can ensure their games and apps make cash by paying attention to what tactics work and where the industry is headed in the future. Below, we take a look at a few key lessons.

Invest in Windows 8 (seriously!)

The Windows 8 ecosystem is small right now — tiny, even — but it won’t stay that way for long. And that’s a mighty big opportunity for developers just starting out.

Above: My Country is one of the most successful games on Windows 8 so far.

“For developers looking to make the biggest breakthrough, I would suggest considering Windows 8. iOS and Android are both way overcrowded. The cost to get into top visibility spots is too high for any small developer to get into,” Trushkina said.

Basically, because there’s not much competition on the platform, any game that gets released won’t be fighting for exposure. And Microsoft has demonstrated that it’s very much interested in giving Windows 8 apps free promotion, which cuts precious dollars off developers’ marketing budgets.

Think global, but know your markets

As any company that’s ever sold a product in multiple markets can confirm, what works in the U.S. probably won’t work as well elsewhere. And mobile games are no exception to that.

Above: Different cultures require different monetization strategies.

Image Credit: Flickr: istolethetv

“You can’t create the same game across countries. They need to feel like game was created just for them. The same items you sell in the U.S. wont sell the same way in Japan,” Trushkina said.

For example, Game Insight noticed that, in Japan, players go through content six times as fast as those in U.S, and Koreans are even faster. This forced Game Insight to scale their content creation based on the demands of gamers (more on that below).

Cultural differences even apply to what extent players are willing to pay for content. According to Trushkina, Japanese gamers are much more likely than Americans to pay for apps and in-app add-ons. The trick, however, is to ask for money early.

“Revenue-per-user rates are much higher in Japan than here. If you create high-quality content and customize it, local users will enjoy it more,” Trushkina said.

Understanding Japan has been a big help to Game Insight, which regularly takes top spots in Japanese sales charts, which, as a foreign developer, is tough to do. “It’s kind of obvious but not many developers are not willing to put time and effort into localization. Translation is not enough,” Trushkina said.

Keep users interested with fresh content

If you want to retain your customers, you’ve got to keep them interested. This is why Game Insight releases new content for its games on a weekly or biweekly basis. “Users want more and more content, and they want different content. The challenge is to keep up with the market to produce content users want,” Trushkina said.

The real trick, however, is developing that new content for old titles alongside new content for new titles. While there’s no simple tip for maintaining that balance, the developers that pull it off will be able to increase their customer bases while retaining the users they already have.

Free-to-play works … if you do it right

If you’re a game developer trying to make cash solely off mobile banner ads, well, you’re doing it wrong.

“Mobile ads don’t work well on phones,” says Trushkina. Unlike most companies, Game Insight sells its games with no advertising and still does well on the platforms it creates for. Instead of relying on banners, Game Insight focuses on creating addictive games and attractive in-app purchases.

A similar strategy applies to comic reading app Narr8, which offers users initial comics free but makes them pay for later episodes. Basically, if you want to make the real money, let users in for free and get them addicted so that they never leave.

Know your platform

This might not come as a big surprise, but Android and iOS are very different beasts. “The differences start with their terms and conditions and go all the way to their app approval process,” Trushkina said, noting that this changes the way developers create apps for each platform.

Apple and Google also have different criteria for determining which apps reach the top of their charts, which for developers is one of the toughest things to understand. “Google’s algorithm for getting into top positions is changing all the time,” Trushkina said.

That’s a big deal considering how much developers already spend trying to attract more users to their apps. Not knowing which criteria have the greatest effect on placement makes it much harder to predict success.

]]>0Five big lessons in mobile monetization from top game developer Game InsightHow all app publishers can benefit from the mobile gaming industry’s best practiceshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/04/03/how-all-app-publishers-can-benefit-from-the-mobile-gaming-industrys-best-practices/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/03/how-all-app-publishers-can-benefit-from-the-mobile-gaming-industrys-best-practices/#commentsThu, 04 Apr 2013 01:50:22 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=707931Guest:Free-to-play has revolutionized the monetization model in gaming by charging players based on their willingness to pay, instead of displaying one set price for all. Indeed, through a dynamic pricing scheme for in-app purchase items, free-to-play has enabled game publishers to monetize the whole of the price/demand curve.
]]>GUEST:

If free-to-play game publishers have made it to the top of the app stores’ grossing charts, it’s for one good reason: Monetizing efficiently was not a choice. Indeed, the free-to-play business model forced publishers to develop and implement the mechanics allowing for successful monetization right from the start.

The good news is, in the process they developed some great practices for the mobile industry as a whole.

As competition continues to heat up in the mobile space, with close to 800,000 apps available on the App Store and as many on Google Play, here’s how all app marketers can learn from them.

Changing the Game

Free-to-play has revolutionized the monetization model in gaming by charging players based on their willingness to pay, instead of displaying one set price for all. Indeed, through a dynamic pricing scheme for in-app purchase items, free-to-play has enabled game publishers to monetize the whole of the price/demand curve.

By removing the lower price limit and allowing a vast majority of users to play the game entirely for free, it has triggered two positive effects: On the one hand, it enabled the generation of high volumes of players, and on the other, it made it possible to monetize part of the long tail of users, either because they are ready to pay smaller amounts, or by showing them ad offers.

By removing the upper price limit, it also made it possible for the most committed players to spend an unlimited amount of money in the game, therefore unleashing an enormous monetization potential. Aeria Games, for example, the publisher of the card-battle game Monster Paradise, recently reported that its ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User) had seen peaks of $90 and above over the holiday season.

Understanding mobile

The most striking realization of Free-to-Play’s potential on mobile is the rise of mid-core games, such as Supercell’s Clash of Clans (which is reported to make $1 million a day, along with the company’s other title, Hay Day). The success of the mid-core genre stands as a strong example of how mobile audiences should be approached: by addressing as many users as possible, but also by understanding and taking advantage of the great variety of mobile usage patterns.

Whether your app is used a couple minutes here and there, 30 minutes during the daily commute, or the whole weekend long, it should be structured in a way that offers (at least) the value that every user expects from it.

Learning from the challenges of free

The free-to-play model, while offering a whole new perspective on monetization, also brought along some major challenges.

First, acquiring users was no longer synonymous with monetizing them. For players to be converted into payers, they also had to be retained and engaged. So publishers had to develop a thorough understanding of the behaviors and usage patterns at play within their game. This was achieved through the implementation of in-app analytics.

For instance, Struan Robertson of NaturalMotion, the successful publisher of free-to-play hits MyHorse and CSR Racing, explained that you should spend time each day looking at your dashboard of stats.

Then, as the cost of acquiring users kept soaring, it became vital for game publishers to know at which price they could buy additional players in order to remain profitable. Sho Masuda, the VP of user acquisition at Japanese publisher Gree, reported that the company used the large amount of data collected over time to forecast what the value of an install for a particular game is going to be.

Finally, quality of players can vary greatly across the traffic sources employed for user acquisition. This in turn strongly enforced the need to accurately track in-app user activity to determine which sources perform best so you can fine-tune the ad spend and optimize the marketing budgets.

Calling all app marketers

To make the most out of their monetization potential — even if survival is not immediately at stake — all app marketers can benefit from the lessons of free:

Understand, consider and engage all your users.

Unleash the monetization potential of your biggest fans.

Understand and take advantage of mobile behaviors and usage patterns through in-app analytics.

We don’t have to wait for the PlayStation 4 to see the future of console gaming, at least when it comes to how we’ll be paying.

Today, developer Naughty Dog releases a free-to-play version of the mulitplayer for Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, its popular PlayStation 3 third-person shooter from 2011. By downloading a client from the PlayStation Network, users can play with the same people who own the full version.

“From the beginning of Uncharted 3, we were always interested in doing a free-to-play option,” Uncharted 3 game director Justin Richmond told GamesBeat. “And during the two-year production cycle that was not a reality that we could ever look at. It was just too complex to start separating the multiplayer into its own thing. So for the past year we’ve been working constantly to figure out how we can do something like that.”

Naughty Dog’s solution is to offer the multiplayer component for free with a level cap at 15. Earning levels is how you access extra content like guns and characters. But even though you stop earning unlocks, you can keep playing the game, or you can pay to have the level cap increased or removed.

“But we actually keep track of the unlocks,” Richmond told GamesBeat. “So if you play hundreds of hours of the free-to-play and are like, ‘You know, I really want to get all the stuff that I earned,’ then the second you pay for that level unlock you get everything that you earned over those hours.”

Players can also buy certain items separately via microtransactions, including characters and guns (but not the mods that make weapons more powerful. You’ll have to earn those by leveling). While many free-to-play titles let users exchange real money for in-game currency (which, ironically, is actual dollars in Uncharted 3), Naughty Dog isn’t planning a similar feature. Nor will it allow players to buy temporary boosts that double the amount of experience or money they earn in a certain amount of time.

“The player base is vibrant,” said Richmond. “We have half a million people playing a month, so this isn’t some sort of grab where we’re like, ‘Oh my god, the game’s dying!’ We think we offer something very unique. The barrier of entry to multiplayer, in general, is very high. Not only do you have to buy the game for a fair amount of money, but then you have to jump into an online component as well. We wanted to give the lowest barrier of entry possible to the most number of people, and we think the free-to-play option is the way to do it.”

Naught Dog provided GamesBeat with some samples of how the pricing will work:

Competitive multiplayer with level 15 cap: free

Raise level cap to 25: $4.99

Co-op Arena (W/Shade Mode): $9.99

Co-op Adventure (W/Fort Co-op): $11.99

Level cap removed: $19.99

Uncharted 3 Game of the Year Digital Version: $39.99

Uncharted 3 won’t offer the first free-to-play shooter experience on the PlayStation 3 (that honor belongs to Dust 514, which is currently in open beta), but it’s interesting to see Sony commit one of its biggest franchises to a pricing format that we usually see on PC games.

“This model works,” said Richmond. “Obviously, it works. I think we’ll be seeing more of it going forward.”

KingsIsle Entertainment vice president and creative director Todd Coleman today announced his departure from the company he helped found in 2005.

KingsIsle is best known for Wizard 101, a family-friendly, free-to-play online game.

Coleman announced his departure today on his Facebook fan page. He called his post “one of the hardest I have ever written,” but he said that this “is something that I have to do.”

He didn’t give specifics, but he said that he is working on “a new company, a new game, a new story. I’m not ready to say, but when I’ve got something to show, you guys will be the first to know.”

Below is his open letter to the community:

Goodbye, thank you, and a new beginning.

This update is going to be one of the hardest that I have written, so please hang with me as I try and get through it.

I have decided to leave KingsIsle and pursue my own course. This might sound crazy – and, full disclosure, it probably is – but it is something that I have to do.

What a fantastic experience this has been! As the creative lead of our games, and the first employee hired in Austin, I was in the unique position to watch this team blossom, and watch our games grow from niche titles to mainstream popularity. Wow! A handful of dreamers got together and turned an unknown start-up into the market leader for family online entertainment… That’s not something you see every day. I am blessed to have been able to play a role, and I know that I am leaving the company in capable hands. I have no doubt that the Spiral will continue to expand for many years.

What is next for me? I’m a storyteller, so I will keep doing what I do best – dream up ideas, breathe life into characters, build worlds for you to explore… only next time, I want to do it for myself. I’m an entrepreneur at heart. A new company, a new game, a new story… I’m not ready to say, but when I’ve got something to show, you guys will be the first to know.

I want to thank you for becoming a part of this community. Your patronage has allowed me to work with my best friends, and to entertain you, for almost a decade. You gave me a chance to build something, something unique and wonderful. These are more than games to me. I see these worlds when I sleep. I greet these characters like old friends.

These are the dreams that filled my childhood. I cannot tell you how fortunate I am, to have been given the chance to share them with you.

Cockshots. Pwnage. Newbs. In any other game, such crass vocabulary would immediately make me ignore it and move on to something else. But U4iA (pronounced “euphoria”) Games is smarter than that and have instead repackaged that attitude in a way that’s both digestible and hilarious.

The free-to-play Offensive Combat runs entirely within your browser, so you don’t have to download a hefty file to play it. You only need the latest version of the Unity Web player. While the title has been in an open beta for the past few months on its website, the developers have officially unleashed its multiplayer shooter on Facebook, a space usually crowded by farm simulators and puzzle games.

Now I can obliterate stranges with a sniper rifle between sessions of reading my news feed and “liking” status updates on the same screen. Welcome to the future, folks.

What you’ll like

Back to the basics
If you stand still, you’ll die. If you miss your shot, you’ll die. If you stop moving for any reason, you’ll probably die. Quick reflexes and itchy trigger fingers are your most valuable assets when facing your online opponents, especially when only a few shots to the head will take you down. The game has a merciless pace akin to id Software’s Quake series.

The run-and-gun style feels refreshing after playing so many other multiplayer shooters buried in complex layers of perks and upgrades. You’ll still use special power-ups and skill trees, but in the end, what matters is how well you can aim your gun.

Testing your luck
Though you don’t have to spend any real money to enjoy it, playing Offensive Combat feels a lot like gambling in a glitzy Las Vegas casino. Instead of neon signs and an endless stream of drunk patrons, you have outlandish-looking avatars — deranged robots, superheroes, and men in banana suits just to name a few — fighting each other in exotic locales, with the best of the best having their names prominently displayed in the sky for all to see (extremely satisfying when it happens to you).

Other little details contribute to this theme. Every kill and victory gives you gold coins, complemented by a loud “cha-ching!” Sometimes, you can win extra experience points, coin bundles, or unlocked weapons by spinning a large wheel (see gallery below) after the end of a battle. Or you can invest in various mystery boxes that randomly award you a prize. And then you have your experience bar, which is the best I’ve ever seen in an FPS: Not only does it tally the number of XP points you earn after a match, but it has a wonderful sound effect that you’d normally hear coming out of a slot machine.

Even if I had a bad session, just seeing and hearing the bar tick closer to the next level made me feel like I hit the jackpot. It’s a weird psychological hook that kept me playing over and over.

Bawdy sense of humor
With the ability to hit people with the “Binder of Women” and then perform a Gangnam Style dance (one of many taunts known as “pwns”) on their corpses, you can tell that the developers are paying attention to the latest happenings in pop culture. You’ll also find parodies and references to other games in the diverse selection of body parts — including a nod to Half-Life protagonist Gordon Freeman — that you can equip on your action figure-like avatar.

The rest of the items are just plain bizarre, like the tentacle arms, chicken legs, and faces sculpted from Internet memes. Seeing the monstrous abominations running around the maps was a little surreal, as I never knew what people might pick up from the eclectic marketplace.

What you won’t like

A not so simple setup
Trying to get Offensive Combat to run smoothly was a bit of a pain. It never became unplayable, but the framerate would slow to a crawl (at times dipping below 20), and the occasional dose of lag during matches didn’t help. And this was after I experimented with the graphics settings, multiple browsers, and reinstalled the Web player.

I have an older gaming PC, but it shouldn’t take this much fussing around to run a browser-based game. Your experience, however, might vary. Some players I chatted with in-game said they had no problems setting everything up at all.

Exorbitant prices for permanent unlocks
In the beginning, you only own your default set of weapons and body parts. If you want more, you can use your gold coins to either “rent” new guns and items (staying in your inventory for a certain amount of days) or buy them permanently (which is the only way you can modify guns with attachments).

In some ways, this makes sense: You can try different weapons and outfits for a small fee before deciding to buy them. But the problem is that costs are rather high, with prices for guns starting at 9,000 coins or more. Skilled players will undoubtedly collect coins at a faster rate, but prepare to devote some serious time if you want to expand your armory.

Conclusion

Despite the technical problems I had to deal with, Offensive Combat is unequivocally the best Facebook game I’ve ever played. It doesn’t have the most robust multiplayer offering out there — it still lacks support for clans and tournaments — but it’s a fast-paced, no-frills shooter that’s easy to get into. Don’t be surprised if it starts taking precious time away from Halo 4 or Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

Score: 80/100

Offensive Combat is available now for free on both Facebook and on its official website. I played and tested the game on Facebook.

Roadhouse Interactive and Infinite Game Publishing announced the launch of the MechWarrior Tactics closed beta today, and they’re encouraging players to provide feedback on the game’s development by buying their way in.

The new Founder’s Program offers players three packages to choose from, and each comes with exclusive benefits and access to the closed beta. The sci-fi turn-based strategy title borrows the structure of a collectible card game, so players can assemble Lances, or squads of four mechs, much like they would decks. It now supports 1-on-1, invite-only matches as well, so you can try out the hexagonal-grid-based combat with a friend.

“MechWarrior Tactics is a game deeply rooted and inspired by the original and cherished BattleTech tabletop games,” Chris Cleroux, the game director at Roadhouse, said in a statement. “It’s important for us to bring to life the essence of the BattleTech experience for fans, and we’re looking forward to their valuable feedback. This is truly a project where the closed beta will be one, long conversation with the fanbase to make sure we creating an experience that captures the magic, excitement, and flavor of the BattleTech universe.”

BattleTech inspired the game’s rules, which Roadhouse then tweaked to fit the online vision. The companies involved have been working closely with creator Jordan Weismann to stay as true to the original games, lore, and universe as possible.

MechWarrior Tactics is a free-to-play, PC browser-based game, so it’s interesting that the developer is inviting prospective players to try it out early by paying for it. You’ll still be able to play it for free when it hits the public (not counting potential microtransactions), but participating in the beta allows serious players to give Roadhouse feedback on how the game is shaping up.

Details on the three available packages are below. They contain in-game currency, limited edition units, decals, skins, badges, and more. Roadhouse may grant temporary currency for testing purposes during the closed beta. Founders members will have to wait to receive their in-game items and currency boosts as well as premium account access, though, until the open beta launches later this year.

The program is only available in North America. The launch date for the finished game has yet to be announced.

The French video game publisher Ubisoft hasn’t engendered a lot of goodwill with PC gamers over the years because of its aggressive digital rights management (DRM) policies. But the company made some big changes a year ago, and it wants gamers to understand that it is playing nicer these days.

“We realized we haven’t always been clear and consistent about communicating what our DRM policy was in the past, and that has led to a bunch of misunderstandings,” said Chris Early, vice president of digital publishing, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Ubisoft’s past policies have created a firestorm of abuse from angry users, both pirates and legitimate customers.

But some observers haven’t noticed yet that Ubisoft has made changes at all, and consumers have a long memory. But Early said the company instituted a big change in June, 2011, with respect to how it implements DRM in PC games. Since then, Ubisoft’s packaged good PC products require a one-time online activation, and then they can be played offline. If you buy the games from Ubisoft online, the games are authenticated at that time. If you play multiplayer sessions or if you play free-to-play games, you have to log in online. Authentication takes place during each session.

“The key date is June 2011,” Early said. “Everything since then is based on our current practice. Every game coming forward is based on that policy, and old games that came before that date are being switched over to that policy. It was originally much more of the stick approach. Now it is much more of the carrot.”

The new policy does a better job of staying out of the way of legitimate and loyal players who just want to enjoy the game.

In 2006, Ubisoft tried to implement the StarForce copy protection technology, but it ran into compatibility issues, and customer complaints led to its disuse. Then, in January 2010, Ubisoft unveiled an online services platform which required users to log into an online service and remain connected while playing Ubisoft PC games. That meant they couldn’t play the games offline and they couldn’t resell their titles on the used game market. Technical problems accompanied the policy. If you were disconnected while playing, your saved game progress was lost in titles like Assassin’s Creed 2 for the PC. Ubisoft stood out in the industry for being aggressive. Angry users responded with denial-of-service attacks and other protests against the company.

“That, combined with challenges we had with uPlay hardware at the time, made for a pretty poor user experience for a couple of games,” Early said. “Listening to consumers, we then removed the DRM requirements for the games, and by June 2011 had this policy in place going forward.”

Accordingly, the negative feedback is lower these days, except when Ubisoft has some hiccups with the technology. (A Google researcher reported a flaw in Ubisoft’s DRM recently, but the company fixed it and said it had no incidents related to that flaw).

He added, “There were enough online components to those games that we mistakenly believe the earlier policy would not be an imposition for players. That was not the case. Players wanted to be able to play in an online and offline mode. They didn’t want to be online all the time to play.”

The earlier policy also limited the number of times a player could install the game Anno 2070 to just three. But if you installed a new graphics card, it would use up one of the installations and require you to reinstall that game. Ubisoft had to correct that again.

“Listening to our customers, we don’t have that as a limit anymore,” Early said.

The point of DRM in the first place is to establish with the consumer that they are getting value when they buy a Ubisoft game, and they should pay for that value, Early said. It helps stop piracy, which can be very high in the PC market. By emphasizing the “carrot” rather than the “stick,” Ubisoft is making use of alternatives that could help reduce piracy and generate more revenue at the same time. For instance, free-to-play games like Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Online open that franchise up to more territories where it isn’t feasible to sell a $60 Ghost Recon Future Soldier game.

“You can participate in a wider variety of services and content or choose a different business model,” Early said. “That allows access to games at a variety of different price points. We can reach a wider variety of people around the world. You can get to our games in more places without pirating them.”

Part of the reason why Ubisoft is the target of piracy is that its games are good.

“If we made terrible games, we wouldn’t have to worry about it at all,” Early said. “The more popular the game is, the more people want to play it wherever they are. As an industry, we need to talk about piracy. At the time when we took a very aggressive stance, we realized it impacted our customers more than it impacted our pirates.”

Ubisoft has also created its uPlay PC game client. That brings together PC game functions together, including a game library. It has social features like chat and leaderboards. It has rewards across platforms and an offline action mode. It has integrated saves, a shopping function, free-to-play games, and a general overall Ubisoft destination. Ubisoft has some rental systems that it supports, but in general it believes users should pay for their games. With online passes, players can reactivate a portion of the multiplayer play with a small fee from the secondary user. That view makes sense because multiplayer play requires Ubisoft to invest money in ongoing support for multiplayer operations, Early said.

“We don’t have excessive complaints about that,” Early said. “In that case, we were not the trailblazer. [EA was]”

There isn’t a consistent view on used games across the industry. But as free-to-play games expand, the used game market isn’t necessarily as relevant anymore, Early said. He didn’t have a comment on what the new game consoles being launched in the future will have as far as DRM policies go. If the platform owners change their policies, you can bet the topic will come up again.

]]>0Ubisoft shifts its digital rights management stance from stick to carrotMechWarrior Online publisher talks about the resurrection of the brand and the future of free-to-play (interview)http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/20/kelly-zmak-mechwarrior-interview/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/20/kelly-zmak-mechwarrior-interview/#commentsMon, 20 Aug 2012 20:04:42 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=508190GamesBeat interviews Kelly Zmak, the president of Infinite Game Publishing, on what it took to bring back the MechWarrior franchise in a free-to-play environment.
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The cafeteria buzzed with excitement. People quickly gathered in groups of four to five, delegating their team captains as they weighed in on the pros and cons of using a wide assortment of mechs — giant mechanical suits equipped with large guns that players use to fight against one another — in the MechWarrior video game universe.

Strange names like Atlas or Jenner popped up in their conversations. Calculated strategies formed out of thin air. Pristine tournament brackets appeared on 42-inch television screens. Thirty-two high-end PC rigs, masquerading as virtual cockpits, lined up on either side of the room, waiting for would-be pilots to command them.

The MechWarrior franchise hasn’t seen a proper release since 2002. The upcoming free-to-play (F2P) shooter MechWarrior Online, developed by Piranha Games and published by Infinite Game Publishing, changes that. Along with the publisher’s MechWarrior Tactics, the revitalized brand is set to make a big splash in this year. IGP continued its momentum by celebrating with the franchise’s diehard community at the Nvidia campus in Santa Clara, Calif.

Before the mech-blasting began, GamesBeat sat down with Kelly Zmak, the president of the Montreal, Quebec-based IGP, who is one of the key folks responsible for MechWarrior’s sudden comeback. Zmak is an industry veteran: He started at Activision in the mid 1980s, and he worked his way up to various corporate positions, including president of the now-defunct Prototype 2 developer Radical Entertainment.

Dressed in jeans, a black collared shirt, and his trademark cowboy hat, Zmak’s candid answers offer some refreshing insight into not just the future of IGP but for the game industry as a whole.

GamesBeat: Infinite Game Publishing has only been around since last year, right? What’s the history behind the company?

Kelly Zmak: Yeah, since August. The initial efforts actually started almost five years ago now. A group of guys got together — Nick Foster, who’s currently our CEO; Anthony Brown; and a number of other guys got together — and started pitching a concept. It was a free-to-play space [with] a business model based off of, obviously, on a mindset of four or five years ago. And if you think about how the market has so dramatically changed over the last few years — even in my mind, the last year — you know the history of it started with an idea. Like most concepts do.

Above: Kelly Zmak, the president of IGP.

Image Credit: linkedin.com

And then really in April/May of last year, when I got involved in 2011, the ideas had formulated. We had established some good relationships with investors, and we started to really identify the business model and the business plans associated with it. So the history started from just a pretty humble beginning of the ideas and a group of people involved, to evolving last year to a [set] of business models and proposals that we brought to an investment group. The most difficult thing of any idea is actually getting somebody to put some money into it and to give you the opportunity to prove that you can do it.

That was really what we were focused on. I was joking with my wife the other day [that] August 19 is our one-year anniversary of the business, and it’s been a wild year. But that history is actually, like most great starts, just an idea and a group of people that got together and said this is what we want to do.

And back then, it involved MechWarrior. So it’s always really revolved around that IP. It’s evolved and changed and certainly modified and grown as we’ve gone through the years, but it’s been a great humble beginning to a place where we think we’re gonna see some great things over the next few years.

GamesBeat: It seems pretty timely, because even four or five years ago, F2P games weren’t up to the quality that they are now with games like Tribes: Ascend or Blacklight Retribution. Was F2P always in store for the revitalization of the MechWarrior brand?

Zmak: Yeah, it was F2P and really focusing on triple-A [quality]. I’m largely from a retail space. I started in ’85, and consoles have always been kind of my heart and my soul, though I’ve had PC experience throughout the years. I was involved in the original Mech 1. I was involved in Mech 2. I was involved in Mech 3. So I have a lot of history with MechWarrior.

When I came in the organization and saw the license and the IP and saw [Russ Bullock, the president of MWO developer Piranha Games] and his team, I really had an opportunity to dive in to what they were wanting this product to be. And then we worked together to evolve that concept. But it always stayed true to the basic premise that we wanted a F2P model that focused on a core gaming audience. We felt that was a niche market place. We felt that it was a untapped audience.

We believe that the maturity that you see in the F2P market in Korea, you’re gonna see in the North America market. We believe that the success of our key competition clearly demonstrates that there’s a desire among consumers to invest in games that they like and are willing to participate in this process. Really, what we’re talking about is a transition from retail boxed product, where I had to think I knew what the product was going to be when I shipped it.

Continue Reading ...]]>0MechWarrior Online publisher talks about the resurrection of the brand and the future of free-to-play (interview)Dragons, dinosaurs, and Transformers: RuneScape’s CEO on the future of free to playhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/07/28/runescapes-ceo-on-the-future-of-free-to-play/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/28/runescapes-ceo-on-the-future-of-free-to-play/#commentsSat, 28 Jul 2012 16:00:01 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=498295Free to play is the future of gaming, even for traditional game publishers, according to Jagex Games Studio CEO Mark Gerhard. He talks to GamesBeat about the rush to the free-to-play model, Jagex's potential market value, and the development of upcoming MMO Transformers Universe.
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RuneScape is one of the oldest established massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, going strong 11 years after its 2001 launch and recently passing 200 million registered accounts. Mark Gerhard (pictured), chief executive officer of Jagex Games Studio, took time to speak to GamesBeat, via email, about the industry’s rush toward free-to-play experiences and the future for Runescape and Jagex.

Embracing a new model

With ongoing contraction in the retail-game sector, more-traditional publishers are embracing the free-to-play model, of which Runescape is a prime example, as they look for opportunities to expand their digital sales. Gerhard says he’s “excited to see the change,” but adds that, “it’s a very different business running a games service [which is how all the successful free-to-play games today are built and run] compared to the traditional publisher’s expertise in commissioning a product, shipping the said product, and simply marketing the life out of it.”

Traditional publishers looking to reinvent themselves is understandable, “given the sharp declines in both their relevance and revenues,” says Gerhard. “Clearly pretending the market hasn’t shifted is not a strategy for success.” He cautions that, “simply observing spectacular results from a handful of industry-leading companies and surmising that it’s easy to replicate is very likely to compound their existing problems rather than resolve them.”

It could be too much of an ask for traditional publishers to embrace the service mindset, constant data analysis, and sustained innovation required to succeed in the free-to-play space. “We are talking about a complete inverse in culture; it’s hard to imagine many will get it right on their own,” says Gerhard.

Saturation of the MMO market

New MMO titles are appearing all the time, which has led to a genuine concern that the market will become overrun. Gerhard believes that players will become more discerning about where they choose to spend their time when this happens and will switch content even faster. He’s happy with Jagex’s position in this eventuality, saying, “I believe as the market becomes more heavily congested, consumers will gravitate towards the most recognizable and trusted brands, a shift that will only continue to benefit Jagex. It ultimately comes down to what’s original and best.”

The launch of major MMO competitors, such as Dungeons and Dragons Online, The Lord of the Rings Online, and Star Trek Online, hasn’t resulted in any attrition in Runescape, according to Gerhard. “Be that because they continue to remain engaged with our ever-changing content throughout, perhaps return rather quickly after trying any new content, or simply that we may serve a different psychographic to the some of these other games is not completely clear.”

Free-to-play releases on consoles

Games like Dust 514 (a first-person shooter set in the EVE Online universe) and superhero MMO DC Universe Online are bringing the free-to-play model to consoles, but Gerhard is adamant that such a move is not on the cards for Jagex. “The amount of online customers around the world accessible via browsers on desktops, smartphones, and tablets ranks in the billions. Weigh that against the tens of millions of connected consoles, and it’s clear that it’s not a number-one priority for us for a while.”

It isn’t just a numbers game. During discussions a few years ago, Gerhard discovered that, “the real issues were not the expected ones of choice of content or even to a degree the commercial models, but rather that the platform holders themselves were not prepared to open up their closed ecosystems to the web. We found that they were even less prepared to contemplate the notion that we insisted our community would be playing the same game on every platform,” including the Wii, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

“When the consoles do open up completely then we would readily support them as part of our roadmap,” says Gerhard. “I’m certain this change will come in time, simply out of necessity, but if history is anything to go by, the progress will be glacial.”

Transformers Universe

Going forward, Jagex is focusing a lot of its key development resources on Transformers Universe, an MMO property with huge potential. The team is, “super excited about how Transformers Universe is taking shape and rather punchy about its potential to be a truly breakthrough game,” says Gerhard. He is aware that a huge amount of work is still required for the project to reach completion, and focus remains on the progress made with every daily game build. “We remain grounded by the enormity of effort still required over the course of the next six months.”

Jagex’s potential

Given the ongoing success of RuneScape and the upcoming release of Transformers Universe, Gerhard is confident of Jagex’s future market value, when compared to companies such as Zynga and Nexon. “I genuinely believe we are a gold mine of equal, if not greater, market-value potential, but that will probably only start to become widely evident early next year as some of our major initiatives start to come to fruition. We’ve still got tons of work to do over the next six months, but if the successes of the first half of this year are anything to go by, we will completely smash it in the second half.”

As for the future of gaming? Gerhard is clear that it lies in the growth of free-to-play initiatives. “Free to play will largely be the way of the future given it offers the best value and choice for consumers. As any industry matures, that’s where the focus shifts.”

]]>0Dragons, dinosaurs, and Transformers: RuneScape’s CEO on the future of free to playMicrosoft shuts down Flight game, bailing out of flight sims for second time in 3 yearshttp://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/microsoft-shuts-down-flight-game-studio-for-second-time-in-three-years/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/microsoft-shuts-down-flight-game-studio-for-second-time-in-three-years/#commentsThu, 26 Jul 2012 03:33:47 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=497394Microsoft has shut down Microsoft Flight and another children's title, Project Columbia, laying off some developers. But the Vancouver, Canada-based studio itself is still operating.
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Update: As Kotaku reports, Microsoft has only shut down Microsoft Flight and another children’s game for Kinect, Project Columbia, laying off some developers. But the Vancouver, Canada-based studio itself is still operating.

In a statement, Microsoft said:

Microsoft Studios is always evaluating its portfolio of products to determine what is best for gamers, families, and the company, and this decision was the result of the natural ebb and flow of our portfolio management. Many factors were considered in the difficult decision to stop development on Microsoft Flight and Project Columbia, but we feel it will help us better align with our long-term goals and development plans. For Microsoft Flight, we will continue to support the community that has embraced the title, and the game will still be available to download for free at http://www.microsoft.com/games/flight/.

Original story: Microsoft has reportedly shut down Microsoft Flight, a simulation game of piloting real-life aircraft, again. If it’s true, as one user reported on Twitter, it would be the second time in three years that that has happened to the flight simulation division.

The company has yet to confirm the rumor, which is spreading rapidly through Facebook and Twitter.

Microsoft was the custodian of one of the longest-running flight sims in the history of video games, Microsoft Flight Simulator. But three years ago, during a time of contraction in the game industry, Microsoft shut down the studio developing this series.

Then the company revived the game studio to create a small-scale version of the traditional games. During the past year, Microsoft launched Microsoft Flight, which is a downloadable, free-to-play, online-only game. In this successor, you can fly one or two aircraft over the Hawaiian landscape. If you want to fly over a different island, you can pay real money to unlock new territories.

As such, Microsoft showed it was willing to invest in games with new business models. Free-to-play web games are taking off. Riot Games has a huge hit with the downloadable, free-to-play game League of Legends. That prompted China’s Tencent to buy Riot for almost $400 million. But not every free-to-play game is a huge hit.

]]>0Microsoft shuts down Flight game, bailing out of flight sims for second time in 3 yearsOuya’s video game console Kickstarter tops $5M raised so far (exclusive interview)http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/17/ouyas-kickstarter-video-game-console-tops-5m-raised-so-far-exclusive-interview/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/17/ouyas-kickstarter-video-game-console-tops-5m-raised-so-far-exclusive-interview/#commentsTue, 17 Jul 2012 21:08:31 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=492793The people have spoken. And they want their Ouya. The new video game console company has raised more than $5 million in a crowd-funded Kickstarter project in just seven days.
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The people have spoken. And they want their Ouya. The new video game console company, Ouya, has raised more than $5 million in a crowd-funded Kickstarter project in just seven days, with 22 more full days to go in the solicitation.

“We’re inching toward 40,000 backers and that’s exciting to see,” said Julie Uhrman, the chief executive and founder of Ouya. “I’m overwhelmed by the support. The idea is resonating with developers and gamers.”

Ouya plans to launch a sub-$100 console in the spring of 2013. It will have free-to-play indie games running on the Android operating system from Google. The machine will have a Tegra 3 processor from Nvidia and a touch-cable game controller.

Since its announcement last week, 39,171 backers have donated $5,002,705, or an average of $127 per donation. Most of them want to get the Ouya console and controller in exchange for a pledge of $99 or more.

Uhrman said donors include game developers who like the open nature of the console, which is going to be hackable for hobbyist purposes. The extra money “allows us to deliver more consoles and do better tools to support game developers,” she said.

Uhrman said the company is taking suggestions into account and she likes the feedback the Kickstarter donors are giving. She said the company may modify the console based on suggestions, but it has not decided on any changes yet. Some players want music and video playback in addition to gaming.

“This feedback allows us to focus on the task,” she said.

Some have reacted with skepticism to the company’s attempt to challenge Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. But Uhrman said, “A little skepticism is healthy. It keeps everyone on their toes.”

Uhrman said the San Francisco company is raising money only on Kickstarter at the moment.

The system will enable developers to make money from their games in any way they want; they’ll no longer be bound to the standard $60 price for a console game. The Ouya will offer free demos and business models such as free-to-play, subscription, virtual goods, or paid fees.

Famous industrial designer Yves Béhar (who also did the Jambox speakers) created the look of the Android-powered Ouya box.

The box will include a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, a Nvidia Tegra 3 graphics processing unit, 8GB of Flash memory, 1GB RAM, and Bluetooth connectivity. The controller takes a cue from the upcoming Nintendo Wii U console: It can play traditional games but also has a touchpad. This means that developers can create special experiences for the Ouya console, Uhrman said. The company is seeking content such as role-playing games, shooters, and casual games.

Ouya will have a custom Android interface and its own online store. It will be open to any developer who would like to make a game for it. The system will launch with TwitchTV integration, so users may view tournaments and live-streamed plays. The standard fee for games or items purchased on the network is 30 percent.

It won’t be easy for a startup to compete against Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Other rivals include Valve’s Steam, a digital distribution client for PCs, and cloud-gaming service OnLive. That’s why venture capitalists turned down Uhrman when she was trying to raise money.

Uhrman came up with the Ouya name at the beginning of last year while she was running digital distribution for IGN, a highly read games news site owned by News Corp.

Advisors include Ed Fries, the former head of Microsoft Game Studios; Brian Fargo, the CEO of InXile and a longtime game developer; Markus “Notch” Persson, the creator of indie sensation Minecraft and head of Mojang; and Adam Saltsman of Canabalt. Investors include Jay Adelson, the former CEO of Digg; Joe Greenstein, the founder of Flixster; Hosain Rahman, the founder of Jawbone; and Eric Hautemont, the publisher of Ticket to Ride. Behar is the Ouya product designer.

]]>1Ouya’s video game console Kickstarter tops $5M raised so far (exclusive interview)Free-to-play games on Xbox 360? It could happen sooner than you thinkhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/04/24/free-to-play-games-on-xbox-360-it-could-happen-sooner-than-you-think/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/24/free-to-play-games-on-xbox-360-it-could-happen-sooner-than-you-think/#commentsTue, 24 Apr 2012 14:00:38 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=420404GamesBeat has learned that at least two free-to-play developers are currently in talks with Microsoft.
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Is Microsoft getting ready to bring free-to-play (F2P) online games to the Xbox 360? At least two developers are currently in talks with the company, GamesBeat has learned.

“There hasn’t been a hi-res free-to-play game on the console yet, and we still don’t have any definite announcements or dates, but we’re actively working on it,” Hi-Rez Studios chief operating officer Todd Harris said in a recent interview. “We are in talks with both console providers, specifically Sony and Microsoft, about how best to support free-to-play on consoles.”

Free-to-play refers to any title that is accessible at no cost and generates revenue through microtransactions and in-game advertising. The business model, commonly used in massively multiplayer online role-playing games and social games, has gained in popularity over the last few years. A study by market research firm Newzoo found consumers spent $4.9 billion on F2P MMOs in 2011, a 24 percent increase over the previous year.

However, despite their growing popularity, F2P titles have had little-to-no presence in the console gaming market. But that could soon change.

Last year, Todd Harris told Eurogamer that F2P games supported by microtransactions on the Xbox 360 are “inevitable.” He still stands by that position, and believes the business model is better for both studios and gamers. “[A free-to-play] game succeeds on its own merits because people can just try it out for themselves. Consumers choose how much they want to pay.” He adds that it also gives developers incentive to deliver content and features that their communities want.

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter has a different opinion. He believes Microsoft is not interested in adopting the business model on the console. “The margin isn’t that good for them, and free users suck up server space,” he said. “Given that Microsoft gets only 30 percent and has to run the servers, it isn’t likely all that profitable.”

Pachter points out that Facebook, which has over 800 million users, makes about a third of its profit from sales of virtual currency for F2P games like Zynga’s FarmVille. He estimates that Xbox Live Gold, Microsoft’s paid subscription service that has around 17 million users, would make maybe $10 million a year. “I’m sure Microsoft doesn’t think it’s worth the hassle. I think Microsoft thinks about profit per user, and they don’t need to cannibalize existing traffic by offering free-to-play.”

R.W. Baird & Co. analyst Colin Sebastian disagrees. While he says the last thing publishers want is to shift gamers from buying $60 titles, he thinks F2P will become a monetization option across platforms. “One thing that companies such as Zynga have taught us is that there is no inherent risk in adopting a free-to-play model as long as the core gamers are willing to play and pay,” he said. “If Microsoft still gets their royalty and subscription fees, then it shouldn’t matter as much to them how publishers price the games.”

GamesBeat contacted Microsoft for this story and was told that the company “is always evaluating different business models, but has nothing to confirm at this time.”

]]>0Free-to-play games on Xbox 360? It could happen sooner than you thinkSnack your way to FarmVille success, as Zynga teams up with Frito-Layhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/03/01/snack-your-way-to-farmville-success-as-zynga-teams-up-with-frito-lay/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/01/snack-your-way-to-farmville-success-as-zynga-teams-up-with-frito-lay/#commentsThu, 01 Mar 2012 15:11:41 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=397269Gaming execs: Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on March 6 Pacific! For better or worse, snacking and gaming seem to be inexorably linked. Now social gaming giant Zynga is building on this relationship, by teaming up […]
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For better or worse, snacking and gaming seem to be inexorably linked. Now social gaming giant Zynga is building on this relationship, by teaming up with Frito-Lay and Walmart, to offer in-game rewards for its popular Facebook games with purchases of specially-marked snacks.

The promotion is a great way of giving the Zynga brand a strong presence in Walmart stores, where $15 and $25 top-up Game Cards will be sold alongside the snacks. They will be prominently placed, in displays near the check lanes, and will no doubt make a great impulse purchase for some of the 240 million active Zynga game players that will be out doing their weekly shop.

From March 1 to April 12, 2012, the promotional codes will be featured on five million bags of snacks. The codes can be redeemed against exclusive virtual items in the three participating Zynga games — FarmVille, CastleVille, and CityVille.

If you want a Flowery Oak to spruce up your castle, you’ll need to grab yourself some Funyuns. A Spring Dragon can be obtained by eating your way through a bag of Cheetos Crunchy Cheese, and a packet of Doritos Nacho Cheese will reward you with a virtual Nacho Garden for FarmVille. Seriously.

Players wanting to get their hands on super items, such as Glowing Glass Condos or Spring Pegacorns, will need to do some serious snacking. These items are unlocked by redeeming on-pack codes from four different specially marked Frito-Lay snack brands, along with a $15 or $25 Zynga Game Card, in the same game.

Jeff Karp, Zynga’s Chief Marketing and Chief Revenue Officer, said: “This promotion between Zynga, Frito-Lay and Walmart is a fantastic example of how brands can work together to bridge the online and offline worlds, all for the benefit of the consumer. We are continually looking for ways to surprise and delight our more than 240 million monthly active users, and we can’t wait to offer our players online, in-game rewards for their offline purchases.”

Full details of the promotion, including a picture of what a Nacho Garden actually looks like, can be found at the Zynga website.

Just remember, as much as you want that Spring Pegacorn, snack responsibly folks.

]]>0Snack your way to FarmVille success, as Zynga teams up with Frito-LayYour odds of staying married in Maplestory may be better than in real lifehttp://venturebeat.com/2012/02/09/your-odds-of-staying-married-in-maplestory-may-be-better-than-in-real-life/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/09/your-odds-of-staying-married-in-maplestory-may-be-better-than-in-real-life/#commentsThu, 09 Feb 2012 17:00:32 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=388113Gaming execs: Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on March 6 Pacific! Marriage in online role-playing game Maplestory is serious business. Just ask some of the folks who found themselves marrying other players in the game, or […]
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Marriage in online role-playing game Maplestory is serious business. Just ask some of the folks who found themselves marrying other players in the game, or the marriage and family therapist who weighed in on their online relationships.

Marriage expert Athena Carrillo Lee of Mind Body Spirit Therapy in Los Angeles had a few words to say about those who virtually tie the knot.

When asked why people form these in-game relationships, she said, “Some players might forge online partnerships because they see it as advantageous, the way someone might marry for money — no offense to those of you with those values. Others, who play in order to socialize, might forge a partnership because they wish to flirt, romance, and marry, as these are certainly social activities.”

Carrillo Lee rates these sorts of bonds quite positively. “If someone is only capable of social interaction at this level, then I’m grateful they have some level of interaction,” she said.

Sadly, for those looking for romance on Maplestory, the odds aren’t great. In 2010, of the 26,982 in-game marriages performed, 20,344, or 75 percent, ended in a virtual divorce. The good news? If you are still interested in finding love, Maplestory divorces dropped to 46 percent in 2011, at least for North American gamers.

According to DivorceRate.org, the divorce rate in America for a first marriage is 50 percent. That goes up to 67 percent for a second marriage. By the third marriage, it’s 74 percent. So it seems you may have a better shot staying married in a game than in real life.

But just like real life, you have to watch out for angry exes in Maplestory. One married player was hit with the classic, “You’re not the person I fell in love with.” His virtual spouse said he didn’t seem to care about her anymore. It gets worse: The gal logged into his account and started dropping the items in his inventory, and that’s when he decided to cut ties with her. Like I said, marriage in Maplestory is serious business.

As for how to be successful in your online marriage, Carrillo Lee says, “Don’t marry to get something, marry to share something — you. It’s a great way to get to know yourself.”

]]>0Your odds of staying married in Maplestory may be better than in real lifeStudy: U.S. gaming population has nearly tripled in three yearshttp://venturebeat.com/2012/02/08/study-u-s-gaming-population-has-nearly-tripled-in-three-years/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/08/study-u-s-gaming-population-has-nearly-tripled-in-three-years/#commentsWed, 08 Feb 2012 08:43:48 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=387712Gaming execs: Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on March 6 Pacific! The number of people playing video games in the U.S. has risen 241 percent since 2008, according to a new study from market research and […]
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The number of people playing video games in the U.S. has risen 241 percent since 2008, according to a new study from market research and consulting company Parks Associates.

The study, Trends in Digital Gaming: Free-to-Play, Social, and Mobile Games, claims 135 million people play at least one hour per month compared to 56 million in 2008. Seventeen percent of all gamers have downloaded a title on their smartphones, up from 7 percent in 2008. About 80 percent play free-to-play (F2P) games on the PC or log into Facebook to spend time on the farm or frontier.

Online and mobile gaming are transforming the industry, the study says, changing it from one focused essentially on packaged goods sold at retail to one that provides services to consumers.

“Instead of ending support of customers after they buy individual game titles, game companies now focus on building gamer communities anddeveloping ongoing relationships with their customers,” said Parks Associates research analyst and study author Pietro Macchiarella. “The positive effect of this approach is that game monetization can be extended beyond the point of sale. Unlike traditional offline games, the online world allows the industry to earn revenue even when people play the same game repeatedly.”

Macchiarella says F2P titles remove the barriers of retail costs and subscription fees, which can be big turnoffs to casual gamers. These players see the microtransaction model — where one buys individual virtual items or upgrades to enhance the gaming experience — as a way to reduce expenditures because it allows them to spend according to their budget.

However, Parks Associates has found that people who spend money on these titles tend to spend amounts that are comparable to the cost of traditional titles. Those who spend money on Facebook games average about $29 per month, while those who pay for virtual goods and upgrades in free-to-play games spend about $21 per month on average. Macchiarella says these amounts are not too far from the $24-$27 per month spent on average by incidental and occasional gamers on new console titles.

Due to the ease of making microtransactions on smartphones and tablets, the study predicts mobile gaming will expand industry revenues over the next several years.

]]>0Study: U.S. gaming population has nearly tripled in three yearsGFACE unveils its new cloud based social gaming networkhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/02/03/gface-unveils-its-new-cloud-based-social-gaming-network/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/03/gface-unveils-its-new-cloud-based-social-gaming-network/#commentsFri, 03 Feb 2012 17:27:44 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=385887Gaming execs: Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on March 6 Pacific! Crytek, the developer behind Crysis and Far Cry, is backing a new social gaming network called GFACE. Created by a “small team with big ideas”, […]
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Crytek, the developer behind Crysis and Far Cry, is backing a new social gaming network called GFACE. Created by a “small team with big ideas”, GFACE promises to deliver high quality free to play multiplayer games directly to your browser, while also offering Facebook-like social network features.

Crytek chief executive officer Cevat Yerli is a director of GFACE, and says, “GFACE enables its users to discover and experience entertainment together in real time. We want everybody to play everywhere for free.” With Facebook already offering its users a multitude of gaming opportunites, GFACE looks to be setting itself apart by focusing on providing quality multiplayer games first, and then building its social network around them.

According to the GFACE website, it will be providing a range of gaming experiences, from casual 2D games right up to console quality ‘core’ 3D games. Crytek’s first person shooter Warface is featured heavily on the site, and looks set to be one of the banner titles for the service. Warface is powered by CryENGINE3, the same game engine used for Crysis, Crysis 2, and the upcoming Homefront 2. It promises to deliver visuals that are “without equal” in the free-to-play arena.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the GFACE service is that all the games will be delivered via cloud-based streaming technology, much like OnLive or Gaikai. This means that hardware limitations won’t stop users from accessing any of the GFACE games. It also looks set to allow smartphone and tablet users to join in with large scale multiplayer games. A promotional image for the service shows three players with different devices teaming up on a multiplayer first person shooter, with each player taking on a different role.

The GFACE website states, “Because GFACE runs in your browser and is designed for live cross platform fun; it is independent of hardware and operating systems, so you can play with everyone, anytime, anywhere.”

GFACE’s social networking features will allow users to create groups, share links and media, and watch live videos together. The service will also include video chat facilities. While none of these features are unique, having them all in one place, alongside a streaming free-to-play gaming service, makes GFACE a very interesting proposition.

GFACE has just entered its closed beta testing phase. You can register your interest in joining the beta at the official website.

]]>0GFACE unveils its new cloud based social gaming networkOnline Warmongers’ founder on building a balanced free-to-play shooter (interview)http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/01/online-warmongers-founder-on-building-a-balanced-free-to-play-shooter-interview/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/01/online-warmongers-founder-on-building-a-balanced-free-to-play-shooter-interview/#commentsWed, 01 Feb 2012 15:00:14 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=384139Gaming execs: Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on March 6 Pacific! Online Warmongers is a company looking to bring the production values and quality of a traditional retail game to a free-to-play shooter. Over a million […]
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Online Warmongers is a company looking to bring the production values and quality of a traditional retail game to a free-to-play shooter. Over a million players have now experienced the beta test of its War Inc. Battle Zone game, and around 200,000 users are logging in every month. With the game due for full release in April, Online Warmongers’ founder Sergey Titov spoke to VentureBeat about building a balanced free-to-play shooter and his vision for the future of the game.

VB: Can you tell us about the background to the game and the team you’ve put together?

ST: When I left Riot Games (I had been serving as Technical Director since the company’s foundation until the summer of 2008), I decided to concentrate on online and free-to-play markets. At this point there was a boom of F2P [free to play] games in Asia, Russia and partially Europe, with some very weak waves hitting the United States. I founded Arktos Entertainment Group – my own investment and online publishing company – and bought out the shares of my partners in Void Production LLC, a Russia-based high-end technology development team.

I then set a goal to our CTO [chief technical officer] to build the best online game engine possible, tailoring it for FTP game requirements. By mid-2009, we had a pretty solid foundation — an extremely reliable and scalable server and backend architecture, and a client that not only provided a fast and very powerful rendering core, but was lightweight and scalable across platforms. In fact we had the client running on PC, Xbox 360, and PS3, and by the end of 2009 we were ready to take the next step – it was time to make a game using our awesome technology.

We had two game concepts; the first being a modern shooter with Battlefield-style game play. I am a huge fan of the Battlefield series, as are some of the Senior team members, and we’ve been dying to bring this type of experience to F2P. The other game idea was a Mech based combat game. The Shooter won.

At the same time we were talking to a few of our friends who were working on the Call of Duty series and also Star Trek Online, and they wanted to start their own company. So this is how Online Warmongers Group and War Inc. Battle Zone were born.

VB: What differentiates your game from other F2P military shooters, such as Alliance of Valiant Arms or Battlefield Play4Free?

ST: As I’ve said before, our goal was to bring traditional retail production value and quality to an F2P game. As gamers, we feel that there are two camps in free-to-play shooters. On one side we have several games that are fun to play, but they feature dated graphics and really low production values. On the other side we have Battlefield and Call of Duty – very high-end, very solid games, but they require the player to pay $60, then grind endless hours, days, and months just to unlock a new decent gun, for example.

We wanted the best of both worlds. We wanted to make a game with premium quality, like modern graphics and high production values, yet we wanted to have all the perks of a free-to-play game. We wanted to be able to speed up our progression by spending a little cash, and we wanted to be able to bring in our friends without having them pay $60 each just to enjoy playing together.

This is what War Inc. Battle Zone is about. We offer a retail quality game in a free-to-play form.

VB: You say that War Inc is balanced to ensure that competitive and loyal players are rewarded. How do you preserve this balance while ensuring that players are still rewarded for their in-game spending?

ST: This has been the hardest thing to solve, and I really hope that we’re almost finished with this task. Basically, when playing War Inc. Battle Zone you always have a choice between spending time on the game and investing some real-world cash to speed things up. Our monetization is built upon that concept.

Yes, paying users will enjoy more convenience perks, as they can create highly customizable private games (basic users have a limited set of options there). They also have early access to new guns and gear, and they have access to some unique items that do not give them an advantage in the game but clearly identify them among players. They have more cosmetics customization options and so on.

It’s clear that our design works – around half of the top players are free players, while [the] other half are paying users.

VB: War Inc was entering its final beta testing period in December 2011. Is this still ongoing, and if so, do you have an expected date for leaving the beta stage?

ST: We launched our first very limited closed beta in April 2011. We launched our first open beta in July 2011 and went into Stage 2 in December. We have very solid plans for an official release of the game in April 2012.

VB: What kind of numbers do you have playing the game at the moment, and what percentage of players do you find spend money on the game?

ST: Since we launched open beta, slightly over 1M users registered and played the beta version of the game. Today around 200K players are playing the game every single month. As for percentage of paying users – I’ll just say that we’re making around $0.40 per day per daily active user.

We understand that still being in beta and actively changing the game design lowers our numbers and conversion rates. This is why we’re working as hard as humanly possible to get to the point when we can safely say, okay we’re done developing Version 1 of the game and we’re ready to officially get rid of the “Beta” stigma.